Houston (Jan. 6, 2012) – The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and the Society of Management Accountants of Canada (CMA Canada) are pleased to announce the recipients of the Greatest Potential Impact on Management Accounting Practice Award for 2012. The first award goes to Alexander Bruggen, Ranjani Krishhnan and Karen Sedatole for their paper, “Drivers and Consequences of Short-Term Production Decisions: Evidence from the Auto Industry,” published in Contemporary Accounting Research. The second goes Scott Jackson for his paper “The Effect of Firms' Depreciation Method Choice on Managers' Capital Investment Decisions,” published in the Accounting Review.

Anne Farrell, member of the AICPA’s business & industry executive committee and Leslie Eldenburg, chair of the Lifetime Contribution Committee presented the awards at the 2012 AAA Management Accounting Section’s mid-year meeting.

Sponsored by the AICPA, CIMA and the CMA Canada, the award recognizes academic papers that are considered to most likely to have a significant impact on management accounting practice. Eligible papers must have been published within the previous five years and submitted by the authors, or nominated by peers. The sponsorship value is $2,000 per award.

The award was created in 2009 to support the next generation of management accounting researchers and to recognize the importance of research to practice and the profession. Management accounting is a core discipline for the Institute’s members in business, industry and government.

“The fresh insights discussed in these award winning papers demonstrate the importance of supporting continued research in the practice of management accounting,” said Carol Scott, AICPA vice president, business, industry and government. “Our business, industry and government members add significant value to their companies by providing analysis, supporting capital investment, capacity and other critical business decisions.”

The research conducted by Bruggen, Krishhnan and Sedatole on excess capacity gives management accountants a better understanding of the effect of traditional absorption cost accounting and performance measurement systems on production decisions. Jackson’s research discusses why straight-line depreciation, relative to accelerated depreciation, might cause non-executive managers to make non-value-maximizing capital investment decisions.

Alexander Bruggen, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He earned his Ph.D. in accounting and M.Sc. in International Business from Maastricht University.

Scott Jackson, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C. He received his Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Nebraska and his M.S and B.S. in accounting from San Diego State University.

Ranjani Krishnan, Ph.D., is the Plant & Moran teaching fellow at the Eli Broad School of Business, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich. She received her Ph.D. and MBA from the University of Pittsburgh.

Karen Sedatole is an associate professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems, Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich. She earned her BSE in computer engineering from Baylor University, her MBA from The University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. from The University of Michigan.

“I can’t say enough about how important it is for the AICPA, CIMA and CMA Canada to support management accounting research,” said Anne Farrell PricewaterhouseCoopers endowed assistant professor chair in accountancy, Miami University Farmer School of Business. “The research the winners perform reinforces that critical link between academia and the decisions that management accountants grapple with in their businesses on a day-to-day basis.”